With the nation facing sky-high gasoline prices and the public hungry for viable alternatives to driving and flying, the Bush administration's decided to veto Amtrak funding citing, hilariously, the notion that the bill doesn't provide enough "accountability."
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No Alternative
11 Jun 2008 01:11 pm
Comments (39)
If only Amtrak went to Iraq.
I'll bet McCain ain't laughing.
Has the Bush Administration funded one thing, just one, that doesn't further enrich their Billionaire base? The war is the most obvious example of transferring public money into the hands of their cronies, but there are dozens of others. Even No Child Left Behind. Too bad they don't have any friends that make trains.
Can anyone explain why even WITH subsidies, Amtrak has such high prices even on the DC-NY-Boston route, relative to alternatives like Buses or even planes?
I can't believe people voted for this moron - it's odd to have a president who alternates between embarrassing and reprehensible on almost a weekly basis while passing up virtually every chance to do something admirable. Paleo-conservative ideology has some very admirable tenets, but the current Republican party is so very very far from that ideology. They deserve to get crushed in the November elections if only to help "Republican" equal "Conservative" again, instead of equaling some ridiculous amalgam of neocon imperialist warmongering, evangelical right "values" pandering, environment-ignorance, apathy for the poor and the middle class, and pathetic deference to the richest and most powerful corporations. McCain might be a disaster, but he couldn't possibly be as bad as this buffoon....
There are a handful of areas that Amtrak passenger rail makes sense, and only one that might be profitable: the northeast corridor, DC/Boston
If you want people to take Amtrak seriously, then ditch all the useless long haul routes, and pitch a plan to seriously upgrade the routes that make sense.
If the public is so hungry for alternatives to flying and driving, why does Amtrak need funding from Congress?
McCain might be a disaster, but he couldn't possibly be as bad as this buffoon....
Are you enlisting to serve in Iran?
Considering that all of Amtrak's services combined provide only about 0.1% of total passenger miles travelled in the United States, the effect of either vetoing or signing this bill on the availability of viable alternatives to flying and driving amounts to a rounding error.
If the public is so hungry for alternatives to flying and driving, why does Amtrak need funding from Congress?
Why do the Airlines keep getting helped out of Bankruptcy.
Why do we drive on non-toll roads, its not like free roads have to be profitable do they?
Okay, with less snark. Why is rail the only form of transport thats required to be profitable for the Government to be allowed to help it?
"Can anyone explain why even WITH subsidies, Amtrak has such high prices even on the DC-NY-Boston route, relative to alternatives like Buses or even planes?"
I haven't done much research on it, but my suspicion is price distortion. The federal highway budget is $28 billion per year. Buses (and cars, trucks, etc.) are also essentially subsidized, since individual buses don't need to pay for the roads they drive on. That cost is borne by the US (or state, or local)taxpayer collectively.
I really don't know who pays for airport maintenance, but airpanes certainly don't need to pay for the maintenance of the air they fly on.
While AMTRAK is subsidized in part, I strongly suspect that not all track maintenance is taken care of by the federal government.
It seems to me that funding for Amtrak is corporate welfare, to which I am opposed. Are the rest of you only opposed to corporate welfare when it's in unpopular industries? I don't like seeing failed business models propped up by the government, and that includes airlines.
I believe Amtrak actually makes a good bit o' money on the Bos-Wash corridor. The reason they charge so much is because there are people willing to pay. It's the 55 dollar tickets (with 95% of the seats empty) from St. Louis to Chicago, or Denver to Lincoln that bleed the budget dry.
I like amtrak. It was my prefered way of getting from New London to D.C.
I don't care that they don't turn a profit overall. I am troubled that they can't even turn a profit on concessions selling beer for 5 bucks a can.
It's my understanding that Amtrak is expensive on NYC-DC routes because they don't own the tracks and have to pay a premium for access. For example, SEPTA+NJ Transit comes to $20 for Philly to Penn Station, but Amtrak is $61, minimum.
Evinfulit, let me know where you buy gasoline without paying taxes on it. If the taxes need to be raised to cover the cost of road construction and maintenance, then by all means they should be raised.
Letting airlines go bankrupt after 9/11 would have been a terrific idea. The planes simply would have been relabeled, by management and labor teams which had more productive relationships. Frankly, it's probably too easy for airlines to reorganize in bankruptcy, as opposed to being forced to liquidate.
If Amtrak subsidies are cut, Amtrak will focus on serving the corridors where their service is highly desired.
JFTR, actually Amtrak does own the tracks between DC and NYC (and on to Boston).
Considering that all of Amtrak's services combined provide only about 0.1% of total passenger miles travelled in the United States, the effect of either vetoing or signing this bill on the availability of viable alternatives to flying and driving amounts to a rounding error.
Well if Amtrak goes under, that would actually be eliminating the alternative to flying or driving.
Strangely enough though, I agree with James Robertson. The problem would be obtaining the land to improve the routes.
Strangely, I agree with what some of Will Allen has to say in his last comment.
However, I'm ok with Congress and Amtrak exchanging some flithy lucre to send some Amtrak pork to a few districts in rural Alabama in exchange for spending the billions necessary to develop high speed rail corridors in more densely populated areas.
Politics is a messy business. Sometimes congressmen are willing to go along with a few billion of useful spending in one part of the country if you toss him a couple million of pointless projects in his own district. I'd rather have the billions of useful development rather than the pride of knowing that I stopped a few million of wasteful pork.
Strangely, I agree with Will Allen-- mostly.
However, if Congressmen will only sign off to billions of Amtrak infrastructure development along its most trafficked corridors if you send them a few million to support their useless train lines through their districts, I'm ok with that. Better to have the billions of necessary infrastructure rather than go without it and only have the pride of knowing you stopped a few million of useless pork from being spent.
In terms of the overall budget, the Amtrak subsidies are really miniscule, to the point where I really don't care. What I do care about is using that spending as political leverage to get support for better infratructure development.
And what do I want my gas taxes to pay for? I want my gas taxes to pay for uncongested roads. How to reduce congestion? Give people an incentive to take a train rather than to take up valuable space on the highway.
Granted, the Bush administration has operated in accountability-free mode for 7 1/2 years -- but that doesn't negate the point that Amtrak is also wastefully operating without accountability.
Second, as Will Allen noted, "If the public is so hungry for alternatives to flying and driving, why does Amtrak need funding from Congress?" High gas prices should make rail more competitive without subsidy, not increase the need for government funds.
Finally, to those who suggest that government rail subsidies are necessary to compensate for government highway subsidies, I think we need a little arithmetic. The federal tax on motor fuels yields $28 billion. The federal highway administration spends about $38 billion. This amounts to a subsidy of roughly $10 billion. Divided by the 4.9 trillion passenger miles traveled on highways, we get a per-passenger mile highway subsidy of about 0.2 cents.
Meanwhile, Amtrak provides less than 6 billion passenger miles of transportation, and a subsidy of $2 billion thus works out to be... 33 cents per passenger mile. This is more than 150 times the federal subsidy for highways.
Maybe my data or arithmetic is off -- but even if they're off by a factor of 20, the fact still holds: Amtrak is subsidized in a way that is utterly beyond any rational justification.
Matt - Why use passenger miles as the mode of comparison, though? In either case, the dollar has to be spent whether or not the road or rail is actually used. It seems to me that miles of road or rail would give a better picture of the subsidies.
Second, I would say that the subsidy for highways is $38 billion, rather than $10 billion. Without all $38 billion of that money, we would have no roads on which to travel, and therefore all of the motorists would have to somehow pay for their own road.
I've just done a little Googling, and found that there are roughly 160,000 miles of federal highway in the US, versus 21,000 miles of Amtrak train tracks. That works out to $237,500/mile in subsidies for roads ($62,500/mile if you use $10 billion), and $95,238/mile for Amtrak. So, the amount of subsidy per mile for rail is either vastly less than, or only about half again as much as, the subsidy per mile of the highway system.
Um, Swan, I don't want to be mean, but let me quote from the link you just provided:
"We must switch as much of our electricity-production from gasoline-using power plants to nuclear power plants as soon as possible, and sign treaties with the rest of the First World so that they will do the same. This will make the oil industry last longer so we will have more time to prepare for the end of oil."
First of all, no power plants use "gasoline". Some electricity is produced from oil, but it is a tiny fraction of US electricity output: less than 2%. The vast bulk of electricity in the US is currently generated from coal, natural gas, nuclear power, and hydropower; the vast bulk of oil consumption in the US is in transportation and heating oil.
Frankly, your wild speculation about peak oil would be a little more credible if you had any clue about how oil is used in the US.
Tel, first of all, many of the subsidies given to Amtrak pay for operation, not construction: nationwide, passenger rail is operating at a loss, and the government is making up the difference.
Second, "per mile" is a bad metric for one very simple reason: each mile of highway accommodates many more passengers than each mile of train track. Note that as I referenced in my earlier post, around 4.9 trillion passenger-miles are spent on the nation's highways, while only around 6 billion are spent on Amtrak. This is a roughly 800-fold difference, while according to your figures Amtrak has fully 1/8th the total mileage of our nation's highways. Putting these facts together, we see that US highways currently account for about 100 times more transportation per mile.
Maybe this disparity could be reduced somewhat by increased use of Amtrak's existing routes. But "100 times" is an awfully big difference, and waving it off to use per mile calculations is wholly unjustified.
(Of course, US highways cost more "per mile" to construct than railways... but this only illustrates why we should use the metric that allows the most direct comparison, passenger-miles, and not the apples-to-oranges concept of total mileage)
Matt, the large-orders-of-magnitude of wasteful spending on Amtrak is used to do things like support Talahassee-to-Los-Angeles lines that are kept alive as sops to congressmen who want money and at least some kind of public transport through their districts as a form of public service. Truthfully, I'm happy to give them a cheap handout in exchange for a massive investment of Amtrak infrastructure.
Plus, I'd be happy to have my gas taxes that I pay to drive up route 95 used to make it easier for other people to take the train over that same route, making my trip less congested.
The former is just a form of graft necessary to grease the wheels of government, and the latter actually means my gas taxes are actually improving my driving travels. I can't say I have any argument with this sort of thing.
Tyro, I hear what you're saying, but if we're forced to keep wasteful projects like Amtrak's ridiculous cross-country rail lines as a precondition for investing in infrastructure, I find it unlikely that said infrastructure won't be vulnerable to the same political shenanigans. I also think that the subsidies are so out of proportion to any notion of efficiency or benefit that even a considerable improvement in usage or infrastructure is unlikely to make them tenable.
With regard to congestion, gas taxes themselves are an appropriate means of long-distance highway congestion pricing. If gas taxes are roughly in line with total highway expenditures (not quite true, but at least they're at the same order of magnitude), the extra driving cost incurred by paying gas tax will roughly reflect the congestion cost of your presence on the road.
This is not true for travel within cities or metropolitan areas: the gas tax is the same whether you're driving down a quaint suburban street or a vital, congested urban artery, and that clearly isn't efficient. For this very reason, I'm much more sympathetic to government subsidies for urban transit. But Amtrak-style long distance rail? I just don't see the justification for such heavy subsidies.
tel,
Matt - Why use passenger miles as the mode of comparison, though? In either case, the dollar has to be spent whether or not the road or rail is actually used. It seems to me that miles of road or rail would give a better picture of the subsidies.
Huh? The whole point is to figure out how to spend the dollars. Why should taxpayers spend 150 times as much to subsidize someone to travel a mile by rail as to travel a mile by road?
Second, I would say that the subsidy for highways is $38 billion, rather than $10 billion. Without all $38 billion of that money, we would have no roads on which to travel, and therefore all of the motorists would have to somehow pay for their own road.
I guess you missed the part where he said that $28 billion of that $38 billion comes from gas taxes. The motorists are paying it themselves by buying gas. It's effectively a form of road-use toll, not a subsidy.
I hate to say this, but the conservative commenters are right here. We really don't need Amtrak's long distance routes, which serve "foamers" (nostalgic types who yearn for the era before the jet age when trains were popular) and idiots who stupidly fear flying.
We DO need more high speed rail and development of middle-distance and short distance rail.
Where to put the rail?
I read something recently about plans for high speed rail between la and vegas. After swallowing some umbrage, it struck me as a fairly good idea. Vegas may be a basically unviable city, but it certainly is a durable destination spot. Most Americans will never go to Europe or Asia; but everybody goes to Las Vegas at some point. Asian tourists benefit, as does anybody who can get a cheaper flight into LA than Vegas. Plus, a lot people will use it to visit LA while in Vegas. Seems like a smart way to introduce Americans to high speed rail.
Another happy thread of "foamers" (right wingers who foam at the mouth when they think of Amtrak).
These are your Republican 'conservatives'- people who don't blink when a hundred billion gets wasted in Iraq, and who obligingly don't say a thing when Bush declares he's a dictator who can tap your phone without a warrant and just make you disappear if you don't like it.
No, these guys get worked up because they are just sure that money is being wasted on Amtrak. The way it works is this- they don't actually know anything about Amtrak, but they know that if they and their friends were in charge of Amtrak, money would be wasted and pork would get sliced.
Well, keep it up, guys- I want America to get a good look at you and your fancy talk- and the way things have turned out with your gang in charge.
catowner, the irony of your rant complaining about other people "foaming at the mouth" is somewhat amusing.
catowner, given that I'm a registered Democrat who has donated over $300 to Barack Obama, it's hard to imagine any rant more completely misplaced than what you just provided. Way to substitute political invective for actual analysis!
Catowner, "foamer" is a non-political term. Has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with people who like to watch trains or have a personal affection for the rail industry - past or present.
Catowner, "foamer" is a non-political term. Has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with people who like to watch trains or have a personal affection for the rail industry - past or present.
"I guess you missed the part where he said that $28 billion of that $38 billion comes from gas taxes. The motorists are paying it themselves by buying gas. It's effectively a form of road-use toll, not a subsidy."
Those gas taxes come from people driving on all sorts of roads, not just federal highways, don't they?
The feds subsidize all sorts of roads, not just federal highways.
I really would like to see someone try to make a serious case for the obscene level of Amtrak subsidies. If it's even anywhere close to 150 times larger per passenger-mile than the road subsidy, it's utterly irrational.
OK, herz yer serious comment-
Amtrak was formed to relieve the railroads of unprofitable passenger service obligations, assume all the labor and pension obligations incurred by previous railroad decisions, maintain passenger service to communities and people, and maintain a core competence in moving passengers, in case, as in WW I and WW II, it became necessary, as a matter of energy economy, to move hundreds of millions of people by rail instead of by car, bus, or plane.
Now, I know that a lot of you smart alecs think all those previous agreements should have just been broken, and that keeping any ability to move people by the most fuel-efficient means we have is just some kind of doom-and-gloom silly thinking. After all, we're number one, right? The oil price spike is just a bubble etc etc etc.
And I know that you think it's a sad thing that this is still a democracy with a few shreds of the rule of law remaining, and you think it's pretty corrupt that the Congress would overrule the veto of such a competent Prez as Bush so rail service would continue in communities where deregulation of buses did not result in improved bus service.
Well, like I said, just keep on talking, but I think I'll put my faith in T C Mits, The Common Man In The Street. To you they're "foamers", to me they're people. Get. A. Clue.
Comments closed June 25, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
What else is new!? The Republican mantra: Penny wise and pound foolish. Save a penny and spend a dollar.
Posted by sootytern | June 11, 2008 1:27 PM